Month: January 2015

“I know Cloud Computing is the ‘in-thing’, so what should I be doing in Cloud Computing?” This is a question that people often ask me when I tell them that I started a company aimed at Cloud education. The answer to this question is again a question, “Who are you?” Lest you think I am being rude there, let me say that what I want to know from the person is the role that he / she is currently playing. The answer I give will depend on it.

Let me try and answer this for various roles in an Enterprise starting from the very top one. This is ofcourse a 10,000ft view and there will be lot of finer detail that I may not have covered. Yet I think this will give you a good idea of the direction you must take in case you want to work in the Cloud.

1. CIO: It should be quite obvious that lot of CIOs would be under pressure to either move to the Cloud or atleast explore the possibility of moving to the Cloud. The CIO ofcourse has to look at the long term pan of the company and work out the economics. So if you are CIO you should be know about the various deployment models of the Cloud (Public, Private, Hybrid) and the various service models (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). You should be able to understand the economics thoroughly (calculating the spend on Cloud is not as easy as you think.) Also the SLAs offered by each provider, their reputation for high uptime and security of your data need to taken into account. The call which the CIOs will generally need to make is whether they want a Cloud model or if they don’t want to manage infrastructure, should they go for Managed Services. To make this decision, they need to understand the difference between a Private Cloud and Managed Data Center. From what I hear and read both have their own advantages and disadvantages. A lot will depend on the applications that are being used by the Enterprise. Needless to say a long term vision about the Infrastructure and getting the best value for money would be the CIOs aim.

Architect : ‘Cloud Architect’ has different connotations depending on where you are working or would like to work. If you want to be a ‘Cloud Architect’ with a Cloud Provider you need to understand the nuts and bolts of how the Cloud is formed. A Cloud Architect in a Cloud Provider space sees less of the Cloud and more of the infrastructure. So while you need to have a clear idea of what Cloud means to the consumer, you must be well versed with Data Center technologies. You should be an expert in either Server Virtualization, Storage or Networking and should be able to understand how Software-Defined-Anything (Storage, Server, Networking) works. Additionally understand the newer technologies like Containers (Docker) which is being used in the Cloud context. Your job will be to Architect the infrastructure to ensure optimal and efficient use. So try and be a domain expert in one of the areas I listed above : Server, Storage or Networking. Depending on the Cloud Provider you may want to become an expert in OpenStack in case of IaaS providers and Cloud Foundry in case of PaaS providers.

If you are a ‘Cloud Architect’ in a company which wants to consume the Cloud, the expectations from you are different. You need to understand the infrastructure services provided by the Cloud Providers and plan for migrating your applications to the Cloud. If will need a good understanding of the services provided to perform efficient migration. You can also plan on developing some of your applications on the Cloud itself and for this too you need to have a clear idea of the services offered by the provider. For example, if you want to migrate your applications to Amazon AWS you should probably think of getting yourself Amazon certified, which will force you to read and understand all the offerings of Amazon.

Similarly if you are more interested in PaaS for your development team, you must understand the offerings from various PaaS vendors whether it Google App Eng, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, IBM BlueMix or anyone else. You need to understand the IDEs they provide, the language support they provide and how easy it is to deploy your application.

Project Managers / Technical Leads: Understanding the deployment scenarios and service offerings of the Cloud Vendor is key. Understanding the economics and keeping a good grip on the money spent will be a major task. For like virtualization, here too we can have a sprawl due to the easy nature of provisioning a VM and the ease at which you can consume any service. So understanding how each service of the provide will put a drain on your exchequer is important. For the final control on the developers lies with the Project Managers and Technical Leads. Understanding the infrastructure and your own application well will let you realistically estimate how easy or difficult it is to migrate to the Cloud

Developers: Even before you understand the Cloud, ensure you can code well in one of the languages used for web services: Ruby, PHP, Python or Java. (You have Node.Js and GO as well but one of the four should suffice for now). Once you have mastered the language it will become easy for you to use any API and interact with the Cloud. You will be seeing all the services offered by the Cloud Provider from a programming perspective and once you understand the APIs you can develop lot of programs based on the Cloud. Overall understanding of Cloud Computing is required also with an inquisitive mind and a good grip on a programming language. Given that providers like Amazon AWS give you free tier for a year and the APIs are readily available, an enterprising programmer can develop her own application on the web in a very short time. If you are going to develop Enterprise class applications you need to understand the three-tier application model and some of the frameworks depending on the language you chose.

Administrators: Amongst different categories the Administrators have the most to learn. Again we have two types of Administrators here: One at the Cloud Providers premises and one at the Consumer premises. If you are the Consumer, then you will need to understand how to use the Management Console or CLI of the Cloud Provider. For example, if you apps are hosted on Amazon you should know how to use the Amazon Console and Amazon CLI to manage your apps in AWS. If it is a different provider then you must understand their UI and CLI. System Admin certification of Amazon AWS and CloudStack certification may be helpful

If you are an Administrator at a Cloud Provider, then as with the Architect, you need to be a specialist in Storage Administration, Network Administration or Server Administration. You must thoroughly understand the concept of Virtualization and how it is applied to Storage, Server and Networking.

Read about various server virtualization technologies like VMware, Xen, KVM, OVM, Virtual Box etc. if you are a Server Admin. Also understand the provisioning tools like Chef. Puppet, Ansible. Also understand container technology like Dockers and tools like Vagrant which allow you to launch VMs.

If you are a storage administrator understand how storage virtualization helps, understand replication and backup technologies. Storage is a very very important part of the Cloud and maintaining the SLAs wrt Storage is a major challenge. Understand what Scale Out Filesystem is and why they are useful in the Cloud Data Center.

My knowledge of networking is not great so I will refrain from giving lot of advice but surely do try and understand the concept of Software Defined Networking.

Hope this gives you an idea of what you must be concentrating on. Hopefully your journey to the Cloud will be smooth.

One of the important factors which affect people’s use of new technology is ease of use. Think iPhone, think Google. Think Amazon AWS.

I started using it Amazon AWS again recently and I am amazed at how easy it is to use. It is almost as if I have never stopped using it. The way you start an EC2 instance, the way you store objects in S3, the way you can host your static website on S3, everything is fairly easy to use. If there are any issues, the documentation ensures you get your doubts cleared soon. Ofcourse, you can understand all these easily if you have an idea of Amazon’s Infrastructure and you are conversant with the difference between Block Storage and Object Storage.

I had used EC2 and S3 earlier but this was the first time I was trying Elastic Bean Stalk and this too was easy to use. In Elastic Beanstalk Amazon deploys a large infrastructure for your application. Your application can run in a load balanced way with Amazon taking care of the load balancing part. It is supposed to scale the infrastructure whenever your application needs scaling. This is done automatically. Additionally your application’s health is monitored constantly. It supports Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java and .Net applications.

I chose PHP for my application and started Elastic Beanstalk. The setting up of infrastructure takes some time, a few minutes. Initially I let the Elastic Beanstalk deploy a sample PHP application. The application was started in the high available infrastructure and I could see the application run using a browser and pasting the link provided by Amazon. Once I checked this out, I wrote my own simple PHP application and asked Elastic Beanstalk to now deploy this application in place of the sample application. It took a few minutes and now the new application was deployed and I could see this application now running in my browser. The whole experience was very smooth.

Ease of use leads to more usage which in turn leads to familiarity which in turn leads us to explore more features of a system which in turn makes us be at ease with the product. Which means we are locked. Consider this: when I started CloudSiksha, I wanted to check if I can use OpenSource Office products. I did it give it a try for a month or more but the feature and the familiarity with MS Office was such that I had finally no choice but to buy a one year license of Office 365. I am not regretting it. I understand and appreciate that not every product can be easy to use but having that as a design criteria would definitely help in the long run. It may sound that I am probably stating a self evident truth but when you use some of the software, (which I shall not name), you wonder how the designers missed this simple self evident truth.

Other than the low cost, this ease of use is probably what makes people go to Amazon I guess. In the coming weeks I will doing more with Amazon and I will let you know how things go.